The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to video/image processing, and more particularly, to a buffering apparatus for buffering a multi-partition video/image bitstream and related method thereof.
VP8 is an open video compression format released by Google®. Like many modern video compression schemes, VP8 is based on decomposition of frames into square subblocks of pixels, prediction of such subblocks using previously constructed blocks, and adjustment of such predictions (as well as synthesis of unpredicted blocks) using a discrete cosine transform (DCT). In one special case, however, VP8 uses a Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT) instead of the commonly used DCT.
WebP is an image format developed by Google® according to VP8. Specifically, WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding and uses a container based on resource interchange file format (RIFF). Besides, WebP is announced to be a new open standard that provides lossy compression for photographic images. In a large scale study of 900,000 web images, WebP images are found 39.8% smaller than joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) images of similar quality. Webmasters, web developers and browser developers therefore can use the WebP format to create smaller, better looking images that can help to improve user's web surfing.
In accordance with the VP8/WebP specification, the input to a VP8/WebP decoder is a sequence of compressed frames whose order matches their order in time. Besides, every compressed frame has multiple partitions included therein. As the VP8/WebP bitstream is configured to transmit compressed frames each having a plurality of partitions included therein, how to efficiently buffer and decode each compressed frame of a multi-partition VP8/WebP bitstream becomes an important issue in this technical field.